CevilleReview

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A thoroughly unlikeable king in a thoroughly loveable game.

By Neilie Johnson

I've been a fan of the point-and-click adventure game for the last fifteen years, cutting my teeth on games like Full Throttle, Sam 'n Max and Grim Fandango. When I heard about Kalypso Media's PC adventure Ceville, I was cautiously excited. When I heard it rumored that Ceville aimed to be the spiritual heir of these classics titles, I was skeptical; defensive even. The game's trailer released in February added weight to the promise of adventure game greatness, which both allayed and worsened my fears. Turns out, it was no problem at all for Ceville to fulfill its considerable promise.

The dialogue and delivery are both excellent.

Ceville rules the kingdom of Faeryanis. In spite of his small stature, Ceville is a sarcastic, merciless tyrant; something like Rowan Atkinson's nasty Blackadder character combined with Danny Devito. At the game's start, the people of Faeryanis have grown tired of having their spirits crushed under the king's tiny bootheel so, with the help of his main advisor Basilius, they overthrow and imprison him. Enraged, he spends his time in prison plotting his revenge with little hope of realizing it until a clever young girl named Lilly comes along and agrees to help his cause.

The gameplay in Ceville uses the familiar point-and-click mechanic as well as having the player interview characters to gather information. Like most adventures of this sort, you move the mouse cursor over the screen until you see an object's name appear whereupon you click the object to hear the character's thoughts or comments about it. There's a lot of this in Ceville, to great humorous effect. The game also is full of funny verbal and visual in-jokes, which you don't have to get, but which provide a lot of fun if you do. (Hint: look for references to Monkey Island, Mario and Dungeon Keeper) Throughout the game you control Ceville, Lilly and later on a vain, air-headed paladin named Ambrosius. Characters are controlled both individually and in tandem and many puzzle solutions require the characters to co-operate. Characters are easily swapped by clicking their on-screen icons or by hitting the Tab key. Each character has his or her own inventory and items can be passed between characters and often need to be to progress.

Please don't call me Cuddle-Bear. It sickens me.

For players new to this genre, it's possible to toggle on the ability to hit the Space bar and reveal all interactive objects in a scene as well as all possible combinations. For the most part, this is unnecessary though because the puzzle solutions, while creative, are never outside the realm of common sense. The co-operative puzzles in particular are very well designed, sometimes requiring characters to act simultaneously. When this happens, the view changes to picture-in-picture with both characters seen in separate locations. During this you can either control both characters at once or monitor what the non-controllable character is doing (generally causing a distraction while the other does something sneaky). Aside from the object-manipulation puzzles, a few puzzles are dialogue-dependent, meaning you have to pick the right response from a list of possibilities in order to make the game progress. This kind of puzzle can kill the immersion if you have to repeatedly attempt a conversation with someone but there are mercifully few of these in the game. That's not to imply that the dialog isn't worth listening to; in fact, it's worth hearing every line.